are SN Cowboy Credits most similar to intellectual units (wisdom from the past ages) or pirate wealth that will forever remain untouched? a bit of both perhaps?

CCs are bought with sats and can be zapped to someone else. On every zap, 30% go into rewards which are then paid out as real sats (just as if you would zap real sats) to anyone (you don't even need to attach a wallet for that, they will be yours to withdraw). @Undisciplined correctly mentioned in the past that the half-life of a CC will almost exactly be 2 zaps (100 * 0.7 * 0.7 = 49 < 50).

is there going to be persistent inflation of the cowboy credits as more satoshis peg-in permanently and irreversibly into cowboy credits?

CCs can only be received via zaps or be bought with sats. So no persistent inflation. Since they get converted into real sats via fees, if everybody attaches a wallet, CCs could even cease to exist.

is 1 cowboy credit always equal 1 sat? what happens when millisats come into play - will we have cowboy millicred?

Yes, in our code, we always see 1 cc like 1 sat. We don't discriminate. We also already use msats in our code since we need to be able to split single satoshis and thus we will have mcredits after we switched.

i am trying to understand what would happen if Saylor dumps a billion sats in this place and makes a billion CC's.

He now has 1 billion CCs that he can zap around or pay for fees. I see no difference than attaching a wallet and using 1 billion real sats to zap around or pay for fees.

not sure if this is a devs territory question, but it feels philosophical, AskSN was depricated, and Saloon is packed.

I would have posted this in ~meta